London Calling: Energy Micro recruit invests $2 million

Alf-Egil Bogen, a co-inventor of the AVR microcontroller, has not only joined Energy Micro as chief marketing officer but has also invested $2 million in the fabless MCU company.

Energy Micro AS (Oslo, Norway) has managed to attract Alf-Egil Bogen to join the company as chief marketing officer (CMO). Not only is Bogen providing his services in a senior executive position but he has invested $2 million into the fabless microcontroller company.

Bogen is one of the inventors of the 8-bit AVR microcontroller, which passed to Atmel Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) in about 1996 and he has served as vice president of marketing and CMO with Atmel Corp. where he was based in San Jose, CA, for the last 4 years.

The 8-bit RISC was developed by Bogen as a student and then at ASIC house Nordic VLSI (Trondheim, Norway) – now Nordic Semiconductor –where it was known as microRISC. It was sold to Atmel in about 1996 and renamed AVR. Bogen said he had moved back to Europe from California in 2012 and had been looking for a new challenge.

In a statement Bogen said: "I have a strong passion for microcontrollers and radios. After helping to make AVR a very successful business for Atmel I wanted to work more with the ARM cores, which are the industry standard for 32-bit embedded microcontrollers." He added: "With Energy Micro's extreme low power EFM32 Cortex-M devices and forthcoming ARM radio transceivers I saw an opportunity to use all my experience to ensure the company becomes truly customer-oriented in providing the products, tools, training and support that developers both need and deserve."

Alf-Egil Bogen, chief marketing officer of Energy Micro

Bogen told EE Times he liked Energy Micro so much he had invested $2 million in the company before he joined. He had also invested in Novelda AS (Kviteseid, Norway), a developer of pulsed radar ICs in CMOS, and Evado Filip Holding Ltd. (London), which provides GPS tracking of kids.

Despite his investment in the privately-held Energy Micro Bogen said he is not taking a seat on the board of directors of the company at this time. Energy Micro was founded in 2007 by CEO Geir Forre, who had previously founded Chipcon and sold it to Texas Instruments.